Word processor Microsoft Word - the most common application for working with word documents in the office and home. However, this program is by no means free, so many have to look for a free alternative to a Microsoft product. And such applications exist.
The most famous free replacement not only for one word processor Word, but for the entire office suite Microsoft Office, today is considered a set of programs under the general name OpenOffice.org. This product grew out of the commercial StarOffice program, the source code of which was freely available from Sun Microsystems. Since the beginning of work on this set of programs, its owner has changed several times (StarDivision, Sun Microsystems, Oracle Corporation), and now the main developer is the Apache Software Foundation. The office suite OpenOffice.org is distributed free of charge, and since 2008 it has been transferred by the government of the Russian Federation to schools in the country for teaching computer science and computer literacy. The OpenOffice.org module that can replace the Microsoft Word word processor is called Writer. In addition to editing and formatting text documents, it, like Word, can be used as a visual editor for HTML pages. Writer can work with files in Microsoft Word, TXT, RTF, XHTML, OASIS Open Document Format (ODF). Since version 2.0, the latter is the default format. The entire OpenOffice suite, including the Writer module, can run on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and FreeBSD operating systems. The disadvantages of this text editor include the lack of a built-in grammar checker function. However, there is already an additional module, the installation of which adds this option. From other substitutes for Microsoft Word, you can choose, for example, the AbiWord program. In terms of built-in capabilities, it is somewhat inferior to the OpenOffice.org package, but the editor's functionality can be extended by additional modules available on the developers' site - a link to it is given below. In addition to its own ABW format, the program can work with RTF and HTML. DOC is also supported, but documents with complex formatting do not open properly. Files from ODT, WPD, SDW and some other formats can be converted to the native AbiWord format using additional plugins.
